7 Financial Services Social Media Insights from Sprout Social

See how financial services is taking a leading role in the new social business.

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A social media study by Sprout Social called the Sprout Social Index delves into how brands are (or sometimes aren't) keeping pace in responding to the upswing of people engaging with them on social.

Their team of data scientists combed through 20,000 public social profiles of brands across Facebook and Twitter. Results were organized by verticals and 15 industry categories.

Here are some of the more eye-opening findings:

Response Rate by Industry

At 28 percent, Banking/Finance had the top response rate of all industries and ranked third, tied with Entertainment, in the average response time of 10 hours.

According to Andrew Caravella, VP of marketing at Sprout Social, there is room for improvement in response time across the board, but the overall responsiveness yields a good picture for the banking and finance industry.

Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio

It's surprising that banking/finance has a higher rate of customer engagement (1.39) than the technology industry (1.26), among others such as travel/hospitality and entertainment. I would think that tech companies would be using social media to interact with their customers more than FS.

Same here, I wouldn't have expected FS to be as highly ranked as it is. It seems like the industry is embracing social media as a means of interacting with customers, which is great. As FS companies gain reputations for being responsive, I'm sure even more customers will reach out with questions/comments via Facebook and Twitter.

Overall, the results of this study are pretty interesting. I also wouldn't have expected Utilities to be so highly ranked, or for Marketing to be as low as it is.

I'm impressed by how comfortably users interact with FS. Once these were just big powerful institutions that were difficult to reach, but social media has really brought the wall down. Glad to see the industry is a top responder and dedicating the resources to keep communication flowing.

On another note, the predominance of Utilities in these results is pretty interesting, I suppose it's a way of alerting the provider to outages and other issues (versus, "hey, thanks for keeping the lights on another day!").